M. David StonePlustek MobileOffice S400The Plustek MobileOffice S400 sticks to the basics, with a manual feed and simplex (one-sided) scanning only, all of which helps make it a lightweight, highly portable option.

The Plustek MobileOffice S400 sticks to the basics, with a manual feed and simplex (one-sided) scanning only, all of which helps make it a lightweight, highly portable option.

The Plustek MobileOffice S400 ($120 street) is best appreciated as a highly portable scanner for people who need to scan single pages or short documents while on the go. As such, its strongest features are its small size, light weight, and ability to get power over a USB connection without needing a separate power cord. That's enough to make it interesting to anyone whose primary concern is portability.

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The S400 lacks the conveniences you can find in, say, the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini ($295 direct, 4 stars), with its 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and 15 page per minute (ppm) speed. The S400 depends on a manual feed and claims only a 3 ppm speed, which is an overstatement, since it doesn't count the time you have to spend actually feeding each page. The S400 doesn't even offer duplexing, which you can find in both the P-150 and the Visioneer Strobe 400 ($299.99 direct, 3 stars). If you want to scan both sides of a page, you have to scan the first side, turn it over, and scan again.

What the S400 offers is sheer portability. At 11.2 ounces, it's lighter than the Strobe 400 by nearly a pound, and lighter still compared to the P-150. It's also smaller than most portable scanners, at 1.3- by 10.8- 1.9-inches. Put it in the protective soft cover that comes with it, and you can slip it into your laptop bag or briefcase without a second thought about the added weight. Of course, you can use it on your desktop for light-duty scanning as well, without it taking up much desk space.

Setup and SoftwareFor my tests, I installed the scanner on a system running Windows Vista. Setup was absolutely typical, consisting of connecting the supplied USB cable and installing the software, which includes both Twain and WIA drivers to let you scan directly from most programs with a scan command.

Plustek supplies essentially the same set of application programs for the S400 as for the Plustek MobileOffice AD450 ($230 street, 3.5 stars) that I reviewed last year. Most notably, these include a capable optical character recognition (OCR) program (Abbyy FineReader Sprint Plus 9.0) and a capable document management program (NewSoft Presto! PageManager 7.1).

The scanner also comes with several additional programs that are less useful, including a photo editor (NewSoft Presto! ImageFolio 4.5), a business card management program (Hotcard Business Card Recognition 3.0), and Plustek's own document management program (DI Capture 1.0).

Even the best photo editor would be of limited use, because the S400, like the vast majority of sheet fed scanners, can damage photos that go though the sheet feeder. A business card program is potentially useful but this particular one didn't score well in my tests. And as I've pointed out in other Plustek Reviews, because DI Capture stores data in its own folder system, it's hard to share the data with other programs.

On the plus side, the S400's scan utility is easy to use and reasonably easy to set up. The scanner itself includes two buttons, labeled PDF and Scan. For each button, you can define settings, including resolution and file format to scan to—with image PDF and Searchable PDF the choices for the PDF button, and a variety of image formats available for the scan button. You can also store separate settings for Color, Grayscale, and Black and White modes for each button.

To scan, you can open the utility first, set the button you plan to use to color, grayscale, or black and white mode, and optionally make changes in the settings. Or, if you know the buttons are already set the way you want them, you can simply put a page in the scanner and hit one of the buttons. If you've set the scanner to continuous scan, you can feed multiple pages, one after the other, and they will go to the same file for formats that allow multiple pages.

PerformanceThe S400 claims a maximum 600 pixel per inch (ppi) optical resolution, which is both typical for document scanners, and much higher resolution than you need for text recognition. The default resolution when using ABBYY FineReader is 200 ppi, which is also reasonably typical. Given the 3 ppm speed rating, and the extra time it takes for manually feeding, the scanner is anything but a speed demon. I timed it at about 1 minute 20 seconds for scanning two pages, recognizing the text, and opening a Microsoft Word file with the scanned document.

The good news is that the scanner did reasonably well for OCR accuracy, recognizing text as small as 8 points on both our Arial and Times New Roman test pages without a mistake. However it loses points for overall OCR capability because it lacks an ADF. Note too that it did not do well with business cards, making three or more mistakes on more than half of the cards in our test suite, and at least one mistake on every card.

The scanner also did reasonably well on document management. In fact, it came in with as high a score as any scanner without an ADF can get. Part of the credit goes to PageManager, for its document management features. But much of the credit goes to the scan utility's ability to scan directly to searchable PDF format, which is generally the most useful file format for document management.

I'd like the Plustek MobileOffice S400 a lot better if it handled business cards well, but that's a problem with the program it comes with, not the scanner itself. If you already have a better program, or don't mind shelling out the money for one, that won't be an issue.

The more important question is whether you're really willing to give up capability for portability. If you want maximum capability on the go, the Canon P-150 remains the portable scanner of choice. The Strobe 400 is a good compromise if you want something more portable than the P-150 but more capable than the S400. If portability is your absolute top priority, however, the Plustek MobileOffice S400 may well be the scanner you want.

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About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

Plustek MobileOffice S400

Plustek MobileOffice S400

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